800-800-0350
Following the demolition of the Gateway District, by the mid-60s new spaces accepting of LGBTQ+ customers emerged along Hennepin and First Avenues in the city's Warehouse District and in the counter-culture center of the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood.
Inspired by the growing homophile movements in places like San Francisco, Minneapolis activists Koreen Phelps and Stephen Ihrig would meet in these safe spaces and in May 1969, one month before the Stonewall Riots in New York, established an informal course for the University of Minnesota called the Homosexual Revolution.
The class quickly evolved to become the student group Fight Repression of Erotic Expression (FREE), which became one of the earliest and largest LGBTQ+ student groups in the country, and the birthplace for a generation of Minnesota LGBTQ+ activists.
Excerpt from Out North
Further Reading
- Barth, Noah. "Going Out, Diving In: Uncovering Queer History in Minneapolis." Minnesota History, Spring 2024.
- Ehrenhalt, Lizzie. "Over the Rainbow: Queer and Trans History in Minnesota." MNopedia.org. May 25, 2021
- FREE You: Minnesota’s Fight for Gay Liberation. Noah Barth, Tyler McDaniel, and Lilliah Campagna. Heritage Studies & Public History program and Tretter Collection for GLBT Studies at the University of Minnesota. Heritage Studies & Public History program and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. May 2019.
- Johansen, Bruce. "Out of Silence: FREE, Minnesota's First Gay Rights Organization." Minnesota History. Spring 2019.
- Muzzy, Emalyn. "FREE: A look into the beginning of gay rights in Minneapolis." The Minnesota Daily. June 24, 2021.
- Van Cleve, Stewart. Land of 10,000 Loves: A History of Queer Minnesota. University of Minnesota Press, 2012.